Animal brains learn by impressions. You are born into a family, into a culture at a particular time. Your spacetime literally forges who you start out as.
We do not know the ultimate fate of the universe, but the leading ideas are that it expands forever, collapses and starts over, or ends in something more extreme.
Before instruments extended our vision, the universe was understood through naked-eye observation—the Sun, Moon, and five wandering planets set against a backdrop of stars that sometimes fell.
Human extinction is not the story of one straight line leading neatly to us. It is the story of many ancient human species living at different times, sometimes side by side, with most eventually disappearing while one lineage survived and spread.